"Having returned from a glorious week away in Crotia and Bosnia (for Pynchon fans: it was “very nice, very nice, very nice indeed”), I have returned to an inbox that features the current state of play with HEFCE’s thinking on open access mandates for a post-2014 REF. In order to ensure that I’ve got it straight in my own head, I thought I’d write a summary post for quick reference. I’m using the PDF version as my reference. This refers to the 16th July 2013 document."

"This is the ninth Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). On this occasion the questions are answered by Dominique Babini, Open Access Advocacy leader at the Latin American Council on Social Sciences (CLACSO). Based in Argentina, CLACSO is an academic network of 345 social science institutions, mainly in the universities of 21 of the region’s countries.

In inviting people to take part in this Q&A series I have been conscious that much of the discussion about Open Access still tends to be dominated by those based in the developed world; or at least developing world voices are often drowned out by the excitable babble of agreement, disagreement, and frequent stalemate, that characterises the Open Access debate. It has therefore never been entirely clear to me how stakeholders in the developing world view OA, and whether their views differ greatly from those that have dominated the OA conversation since it began in around 1994. In the hope of gaining a better understanding I plan to invite a number of people based in the developing world to take part in this series. To start the ball rolling I am today publishing a Q&A with Dominique Babini, who is based at the University of Buenos Aires. Readers will judge for themselves how, and to what extent, Babini’s views differ from those we hear so often from those based in, say, North America or Europe."

Jacqui has 25 years experience of building technology solutions across the world. After implementing a banking regulatory change programme with Web 3.0 tools she co-founded FlyingBinary. The company implements scalable data platforms for clients in the private, public and third sector which enable them to make social part of their DNA. An appointment to the Cabinet Office as an Open Data domain expert recognised her as a web scientist of influence in the era of Big Data. Jacqui trains Advanced Analysts on the Science of Data Visualisation, is a regular speaker on Cloud Adoption, Big Data, Smarter Analytics and Profiting from the Web. You can follow Jacqui at @jacquitaylorfb."

"1. Model. The HEFCE proposal to mandate immediate (not retrospective) deposit of journal articles in the author's institutional repository in order to make them eligible for evaluation in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) is wise and timely, and, if adopted, will serve as a model for the rest of the world. It will also complement the Green (self-archiving) component of the RCUK Open Access (OA) mandate, providing it with an all-important mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance.

2. Monographs. Exempting monographs for now was a good decision. The HEFCE mandate, like the RCUK mandate, applies only to peer-reviewed journal articles. These are all author giveaways, written solely for research impact, not royalty income. This is not true of all monographs. (But a simple compromise is possible: recommend -- but don't require -- monograph deposit too, but with access set as Closed Access rather than Open Access, with no limit on the length of the OA embargo. Author choice.)"

"This week, I’m co-teaching with Lynne Siemens at the European Summer School in Digital Humanities. Held at the University of Leipzig and directed by the esteemed Elisabeth Burr, it is an international gathering of scholars and students exploring the intersections of culture and technology.Lynne and I are teaching our Large Project Management and Development class. Lynne’s been here before but I’m joining for the first time after leading the course at DHSI in Victoria.

As someone who co-directs an instructional school in the US (the newly renamed HILT), one of the incredible aspects of teaching in the European context is the number of students drawn from masters programs throughout the globe. Something like seventy nationalities and three dozen countries are represented here. And overwhelmingly, these are students who are completing their masters degrees and/or getting started with their Ph.D."

Peter notes the damage that the publisher lobby has successully inflicted on worldwide (but especially UK) OA progress with the Finch/RCUK policy, but I'm sure he will agree that if the Trojan Horse of CHORUS were to be accepted by the US federal government and its funding agencies, the damage would be even greater and longer lasting:"

I think Danny is spot-on in all the points she makes, so these are just a few supplementary remarks:

1. The publishing industry is using Green OA embargoes and lobbying to try to hold OA hostage to its current inflated revenue streams as long as possible-- by forcing the research community to pay for over-priced, double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid) Fools Gold if it wants to have OA at all.

It's time for the research community to stop stating that it will stop mandating and providing Green OA if there's ever any evidence that it will cause subscription cancelations. Of course Green OA will cause cancelations, eventually; and so it should.

Green OA will not only provide 100% OA but it will also force publishers to phase out obsolete products and services and their costs, by offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide nework of Green OA repositories.

Once subscriptions are made unsustainable by mandatory Green OA, journals will downsize and convert to post-Green Fair-Gold, in place of today's over-priced, double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid) Fools-Gold."

"The cynical, self-serving spin of Springer's replies to Richard Poynder is breathtaking: Is it a sign of Springer's new ownership?

Despite the double-talk, applying a 12-month embargo where the policy has been to endorse unembargoed immediate-Green for 10 years could hardly be described (or justified) as "simplifying" things for the author, or anyone. It would be a pure and simple bid to maintain and maximize revenue streams from both subscriptions and Gold OA. (Note that I say "would" because in fact Springer is still Green and hence still on the Side of the Angels: read on.)

As stated previously, the distinction between an author's institutional repository and an author's "personal website" (which is of course likewise institutional) is a distinction between different sectors of an institutional disk. The rest is a matter of tagging."

"Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and leading provider of licensing and Open Access (OA) solutions, announces that Cambridge University Press has selected CCC's RightsLink for Open Access to manage Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its Open Access publications.

"RightsLink for Open Access enables scholarly and academic publishers to quickly and effectively execute APCs as well as page and color changes, submission fees and author reprints," said Roy Kaufman, Managing Director, New Ventures, CCC. "By implementing RightsLink for Open Access for its publications, Cambridge University Press will not only save time and money, but also enable its authors to place orders with confidence and ease."

"This week, the UK’s Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) published their formal proposals for including an open access requirement in any post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Responses to this will be accepted until 30th October 2013. These proposals follow a pre-consultation letter and set of responses which were submitted earlier in the year (link to University of Cambridge response).

Following up our concerns about the policy raised over the last few months (here and here, further posts here) the present iteration represents a decent outcome on some of the details, not least because it defers quite a few of them. That these issues have been deferred does not mean that they do not matter; rather it means that the battles on them will be fought elsewhere – with universities, with journal boards, with learned societies, with publishers and their lawyers and so on. Moreover, there is no cause for complacency around the broader political economy of scholarly publishing, which remains wasteful, restrictive and inequitable on many fronts. And of course, the pernicious REF exercise itself, which this government signalled it would review, must be itself vigorously contested (more on this to come)."

As discussed earlier in this blog it is obvious that non-commercial and non-derivatives licenses do not comply with the requirements of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the RCUK Open Access policy and the Berlin Declaration. All these licences have to be considered as totally incompatible with “Open Access” publishing.

If you look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the new Directory of Open Access Monographs (DOAB), you will find most of the publications listed are using non-commercial and non-derivatives licenses which are not open in Terms of the Definition of “Open”. Even if the metadata in DOAJ and DOAB is licensed under an open license (CC-BY-SA), they do not list true “Open Access” publications as they promise. These two open access directories are just two of many examples of an ongoing threat of the idea of unrestricted access and reuse of academic publications."

"Yesterday, I hit a nerve on Twitter. Ok, more than one. But it resulted in a great discussion about open access and brought up some interesting questions. I’d like to take the opportunity to explain in more detail what I meant and did not mean by my tweet. And then I’d like to open up the discussion further. But first, the backstory.

I am writing a systematic review. For those not familiar with the concept, this is not simply summarizing work others have done in a particular area of research. It involves designing searches, implementing filters, and clearly outlining criteria for selecting or excluding articles. The idea is to give a complete overview of the literature and be able to quantify, for example, what percentage of studies in the research area used a certain technique, or arrived at a common conclusion."

"This paper describes tools and methods developed as part of Linked Jazz, a project that uses Linked Open Data (LOD) to reveal personal and professional relationships among jazz musicians based on interviews from jazz archives. The overarching aim of Linked Jazz is to explore the possibilities offered by LOD to enhance the visibility of cultural heritage materials and enrich the semantics that describe them. While the full Linked Jazz dataset is still under development, this paper presents two applications that have laid the foundation for the creation of this dataset: the Mapping and Curator Tool, and the Transcript Analyzer. These applications have served primarily for data preparation, analysis, and curation and are representative of the types of tools and methods needed to craft linked data from digital content available on the web. This paper discusses these two domain-agnostic tools developed to create LOD from digital textual documents and offers insight into the process behind the creation of LOD in general."

"Initial proposals published in February envisaged requiring a certain proportion of submitted monographs to be open access. However, among the 260 respondents to an informal consultation on the plans there was “widespread concern about the extent to which open access is reasonably achievable” for monographs.

For that reason, monographs will now be exempt from the mandate. However, the funding councils’ formal proposals, published for consultation on July 24, make clear the exemption will only be temporary “in view of our expectation that open access publication for monographs and books is likely to be achievable in the long term”.

The “overwhelming majority” of respondents to the informal consultation agreed that it is not currently feasible to require data sets to be open access. Hence, the first open access REF mandate will apply only to journal articles and conference proceedings whose authors include UK-based academics."

"Views are invited on the open access proposals for the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF).

The four UK higher education funding bodies aim to further increase the proportion of research outputs published in open-access form by introducing this as a requirement in the next REF [Notes 1 and 2]. This is in line with the funding bodies’ policy that the outputs from all research supported by our funding should be as widely and freely accessible as the available channels for dissemination permit.

The proposals set out the details for implementing this requirement, and were developed following the advice received by the funding bodies in response to our earlier letter on open access. The consultation document is available on the HEFCE web-site. It seeks comments on the proposed criteria for open access in the post-2014 REF, the definition of the research outputs to which the criteria should apply, and the proposed approaches to exceptions from the open access requirement. The proposals have no relevance to the current REF 2014 exercise."

"This is the eighth Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). On this occasion the questions are answered by Peter Suber, de facto leader of the OA movement.

Philosopher, jurist, and one-time stand-up comic, Peter Suber was one of the small group of people invited by the Soros Foundation to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) meeting held in Hungary in 2001. It was in Budapest that the term Open Access was chosen, and a definition of OA agreed. And it was Suber who drafted that definition, doing so with words that still stir, inspire, and motivate OA advocates everywhere. It was also Suber who chose to make the biggest sacrifice for the cause. In 2003 he gave up his position as a tenured full professor to become a full-time advocate for the movement, swapping secure employment for a series of uncertain, short-term grants."

"The debate about the need to revise metrics that evaluate research excellence has been ongoing for years, and a number of studies have identified important issues that have yet to be addressed. Internet and other technological developments have enabled the collection of richer data and new approaches to research assessment exercises. Open access strongly advocates for maximizing research impact by enhancing seamless accessibility. In addition, new tools and strategies have been used by open access journals and repositories to showcase how science can benefit from free online dissemination. Latest players in the debate include initiatives based on alt-metrics, which enrich the landscape with promising indicators. To start with, the article gives a brief overview of the debate and the role of open access in advancing a new frame to assess science. Next, the work focuses on the strategy that the Spanish National Research Council’s repository DIGITAL.CSIC is implementing to collect a rich set of statistics and other metrics that are useful for repository administrators, researchers and the institution alike. A preliminary analysis of data hints at correlations between free dissemination of research through DIGITAL.CSIC and enhanced impact, reusability and sharing of CSIC science on the web."

"This is the seventh Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). On this occasion the questions are answered by Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG), an organisation founded at the end of last year by six Australian universities in order to provide “a concerted and coordinated Australian voice in support of open access.”

So far, 2013 has seen the OA scene dominated by events in the US and Europe. In the US, for instance, we have seen the publication of the OSTP Memorandum and the introduction of the FASTR bill in Congress. In Europe, the EU has committed to OA for its Horizon 2020 Framework Programme and the European Research Council has published its Guidelines for Open Access. But it is the controversial OA Policy introduced on April 1st by Research Councils UK (RCUK) that has attracted the greatest attention (and opprobrium) within the OA movement, not least because of its stipulation that researchers favour Gold over Green OA, and its endorsement of Hybrid OA."

"While some librarians are for- and some librarians are against- open access, I sit in the former camp. I am not going to preach about the benefits of OA, which are well documented, I’m just going to state that for me and others, including governments, the debate on OA is over. It is an inevitable progression of scholarly communication in the digital information age. Furthermore, it is an important evolution of science & knowledge. How we implement OA via Gold or Green is however worthy of discussion. It will be interesting to see how the UK fairs out in this regard, especially when most other English speaking countries and areas are going the Green route (USA, Ireland, Australia, EU).

When advocating for OA I find it is useful to start with policy and it’s important to keep up to date with this area as it is evolving. For a good global overview on OA policies please see this Canadian overview and this Australian overview. The next challenge is infrastructure and the EU has been stepping up progress in this regard, by providing a dedicated site with resources for Repository Managers, Researchers & Project Co-Coordinators on OpenAire. In some EU countries (Denmark, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, UK) national open access groups have formed to look at policy and its implementation particularly with regard to Horizon 2020 funded projects across European countries."

"Running into a publisher’s paywall is one of the biggest daily frustrations that many in research tend to encounter. Students and health advocates David Carroll and Joe McArthur decided to take these dead ends and turn them into something useful. With the help of the open source and open access communities, they have just created a prototype of a tool—the OA Button—to map article access denials and help users track down a version of the publication available for their use.

David Carroll took a year out of his medical studies at Queen's University in Belfast to gain research experience in the lab. For his study on cystic fibrosis, he read only papers for which his university had a subscription or those published in open access. At $35 a paper, everything else written on the topic fell by the wayside. “That gap in my knowledge probably ended my research,” he says, “because I didn’t have the opportunity to read everything [that would help me] generate hypotheses. I could only use what I had.”

"How to disseminate Open Access? How to convince scholars, universities and research institutions that OA may help in the development of science? These questions are a never-ending topic of discussion in the scientific community. There are also many answers to these questions, and one of them is a mandatory OA policy for scientists, established by a government or university. However, the question is: does it really work?

The mandatory policy for OA has its supporters and opponents and this division can be observed pretty well during the discussions on the new regulations in the UK. The opponents may say that new rules favor one type of OA and marginalize the other (Gold vs. Green), that the objectivity and freedom of scientific research may be compromised, that freedom of choice is being limited, or that those who control funding will have undue influence on what is being published and where.

Many of these arguments may, or indeed touch upon the real threats that may arise with the introduction of top-down rules for OA. Unfortunately, there is always a shortage of funds for science, research and publishing. Each institution introducing rules concerning OA, whether it is a university or government, will take into account the financial factor and try to choose the best compromise. Of course, you can always argue whether the solution actually supports OA and scientists or not."

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